Chris Hani

Thembisile Martin Hani was born in Cofimvaba, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, on the twenty-eighth of June 1942. He took his undergraduate degree at the University of Fort Hare, joined the ANC and the South African Communist Party at twenty, and left South Africa for exile in 1963 after his second arrest by the apartheid regime.

He served as a fighter with Umkhonto we Sizwe — the armed wing of the ANC — in the Wankie Campaign in Rhodesia in 1967, training under the African National Council of Zimbabwe and ZIPRA. By the 1980s he was MK's chief of staff and operational commander; the apartheid regime considered him, alongside Joe Slovo, the most strategically dangerous figure in the entire South African opposition. He survived at least seven assassination attempts.

He returned to South Africa in 1990 after the unbanning of the ANC and the SACP. He was elected General Secretary of the South African Communist Party in 1991. He was, in the period between Mandela's release and the 1994 elections, the single political figure most capable of organizing the disaffected Black youth of the townships — and therefore the figure most likely to break the rolling political transition the apartheid state and the ANC leadership were jointly negotiating.

He was assassinated outside his home in Dawn Park, Boksburg, on the tenth of April 1993, by a Polish-born far-right militant Janusz Waluś acting in concert with the Conservative Party leader Clive Derby-Lewis. The killers had spent two years stalking him. He was fifty.

Nelson Mandela's televised address that evening — eight months before the formal transition — held the country back from civil war. The 1994 elections proceeded as scheduled.

He is honored here as the commander whose assassination should have ended the South African transition, and did not.